Buried

‘What do we think’s in the syringe?’ Holland asked.

A DS in front of him – a tall Scotsman with a mullet – turned around. ‘Rohypnol maybe, or diazepam. Any benzodiazepine, really.’

‘How’s he get hold of that kind of stuff?’

‘With a computer and a credit card. It’s pretty bloody simple these days. They shut down a site a couple of weeks ago that was selling a vial of ketamine and a couple of syringes in a smart leather case. Knocking them out at £19.99 as “date-rape kits”.’

‘Doesn’t he need to know what he’s doing, though? If he’s going to keep the kid sedated all the time?’

Thorne listened to the exchange, but kept his eyes fixed on the television screen; on the frozen, flickering image of the boy and the man who was holding him. There was terror in the boy’s eyes. It had been there throughout, of course, albeit partially hidden by the brave face he’d been putting on for his parents. But the mask had fallen quickly away when the man began walking towards him with the needle.

The Scottish officer shook his head. ‘You can also find out how to do it on the Net. Plenty of teach-yourself guides out there. What size doses to use or whatever.’

‘Or you learn from experience,’ Thorne said.

There was a sizeable pause after that.

Then the ACTIONS were outlined and allocated. There was little of substance to work on other than the partial number plate of the blue or black car, and talking to a few more witnesses who’d seen Luke getting into it.

Porter waited until most of her team had been given tasks and those few who hadn’t were clearing away chairs or paperwork before she talked to Thorne and Holland about their roles. ‘I’m going back to the school this afternoon,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which of you is better at talking to teenage boys…’

Holland was the first to speak up, aware of a good, long look from Thorne as he answered. ‘Yeah, I’ll tag along.’

‘Tom?’

‘I thought I might have a word with one or two people Tony Mullen used to work with,’ Thorne said. ‘Show them the list. See if their memory’s any better than his.’

At the end of the previous day, Mullen had handed over the list of all those who might have held a grudge against him.

‘He has got quite a lot to think about,’ Porter said.

Thorne could see she had a point, but he was not completely convinced. ‘That’s exactly why I thought it might be more… comprehensive, I suppose. If my son was taken and there was no obvious reason why, I’d be sticking down the name of anyone who’d so much as looked at me fu

Mullen had come up with just five names. Five men who might, at one time, have had cause to wish or do him harm. Each had been run through the CRIMINT database within minutes, and once those traced to Australia, HMP Parkhurst and Kensal Green cemetery had been eliminated, they were down to two.

Porter was pulling papers from her desktop, bits and pieces from a drawer and sweeping them into her handbag. ‘I’m going over to the house for an hour or two first. I’ll probably head straight to the school from there. You never know, he’s had a bit more time to think, he might have come up with another name or two overnight.’

She picked up her mobile phone and clipped it to her belt, then dropped a second handset into her handbag. The Airwave had been rolled out across the force over the previous year and a half, one handset issued to every officer. It was certainly an ingenious piece of kit: a phone and a radio, with a range that, for the first time, would allow the user to talk to a fellow officer anywhere in the UK at the touch of a button. Still, in spite of a blizzard of memos, some officers preferred to stick with their own phones. These were less flashy perhaps, but they were generally smaller, lighter and, most importantly, didn’t have GPS capability built in. Mysteriously, a large number of these state-of-the-art Airwave handsets were getting lost, or left at home by officers who were none too keen on Control-room staff knowing exactly where they were at all times.

Thorne was interested to note that, as far as he could see, Porter’s Airwave had not been switched on when she’d dropped it into her bag.

The team’s DCI, a quietly spoken Geordie who needed to lose a few pounds, appeared at Porter’s shoulder, brandishing a sheaf of papers and telling her that he needed five minutes with her before she disappeared. Though Barry Hignett had met Thorne and Holland briefly first thing, he took the chance to welcome them again, explaining that there was bugger-all room for niceties on the teeth of a case such as this one.

Hignett walked Porter to a nearby desk and spread out the papers in front of her. Holland watched for a minute, then turned around, his back to them, and spoke low to Thorne: ‘Did you want to go to the school?’

Thorne looked at him as though he were speaking Chinese. ‘What?’

‘With Porter, I mean.’ He lowered his voice further still. ‘Only I thought you looked a bit pissed off before, when I said that I’d go.’

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ Thorne said.

When Porter had finished with Hignett, she arranged to meet Holland later at the school. Then Thorne took the stairs with her down to ground level.

‘They’re being fairly nice to me.’ Thorne said it quietly, nodding as an officer he’d spoken to once or twice moved past him, coming up. ‘That’s what Luke said on the tape.’ It had been a dramatic moment when the figure with the syringe had emerged from behind the camera. The picture had remained unsteady, the camera clearly handheld rather than mounted on a tripod. Whatever Luke had said or not said, that was when it had become clear that he was being held by more than one person. That they were looking at a conspiracy to kidnap. ‘Two of them, d’you reckon? Or more?’

‘If it’s just two, I’d put money on the other one being the woman Luke was seen with.’

‘Is that common? A man and a woman working as a team?’

‘I’ve come across it a few times,’ Porter said. ‘For obvious reasons, the woman’s most often the one involved in the abduction itself. The trust figure.’

‘Right.’

For obvious reasons.

Thorne wondered why, in the light of so many highprofile cases, those reasons remained obvious, but clearly they did. Hindley was always more hated than Brady. Maxine Carr, despite being found not guilty of even knowing that her boyfriend had murdered two young girls, was, if anything, the more vilified of the two.

‘A couple of the kids reckoned they’d spotted them together before, didn’t they?’ Thorne said. ‘Luke and this woman. She obviously took her time to get close to him.’

‘It paid off,’ Porter said. ‘Talking of which, there’s still no sign of a ransom demand. No talk of anyone getting paid off.’

‘Maybe that’ll be on the next tape.’ But as they came out into the lobby on the ground floor, and moved towards the revolving doors, Thorne was still thinking about the ‘how’ rather than the ‘why’. Imagining a woman getting close to her victim; smiling and touching and always attentive. Thinking that trust was nurtured, like bodies and minds; that it was abused at the same time that they were. He remembered the smile that faltered a little as the boy on the screen had done his best to crack jokes. He remembered the emptiness in the stare. He wondered if Luke Mullen would ever trust anyone again.

The drizzle hadn’t stopped all morning, but there were still plenty of people milling around outside the entrance. A couple sat eating sandwiches, perched on adjacent concrete stumps. Rows of these bollards, installed to deter car-bombers, had sprung up outside most of the city’s public buildings, and Thorne often wondered if cement companies might be secretly funding some of the terrorist groups. He shared the theory with Porter and they paused for a minute, enjoying the joke; Thorne, on his way towards the tube station at St James’s Park and Porter headed for the Yard’s underground garage.